The Omicron variant is hitting Hong Kong hard: the death rate per million population has reached the highest level in the developed world. Here are the reasons for a crisis that now worries, and a lot, the Beijing government (and the Stock Exchange)
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT FROM BEIJING
Hospitals full of patients, forced to turn open parking lots in front of the emergency room into wards; the plastic bags with the dead next to the stretchers with the sick fighting for survival.
They are nightmare scenes for Hong Konga rich and hyper-technological city that is perhaps suffering pi in Wuhan in this new wave of Covid-19.
In the first two years of the pandemic, Hong Kong had managed to keep the number of cases and deaths under control, which had been only 213.
The City had proved ready to react also thanks to the experience of epidemics made during the crisis for Sars, in 2003.
Now, there have been 249 deaths in the last 24 hours, out of a population of approximately 7.2 million inhabitants. Since the start of the new and unexpected crisis, at the end of December, the deaths have been about 4,000 and have resulted the death rate per million population is at the highest level in the developed world.
From Beijing the central government looks forward to the situation in the Special Administrative Region (days ago we were writing about how the health system would be disintegrated by a situation like that of Hong Kong extended to mainland China) and he decided to send a thousand doctors and nurses to help the Hong Kong health system to the end.
City officials say the priority is now to care for patients admitted to saturated hospitals. The first 75 doctors of the Chinese contingent landed and began to support their colleagues. But even a thousand more doctors do not change the situation on the front of the epidemic: the cases detected settled at around 26,000 per daybringing the total of infections to 733 thousand, 98% recorded in this devastating wave.
The concern also arrived at Bags: on the Italian morning of Tuesday 15 March, the closure of the Hong Kong stock market was close to -6 per cent.
Which ones are they the causes of the disaster?
Also Hong Kong followed the policy of mainland Chinaeffectively closing the borders and chasing the line Zero Covid.
But it was unable to apply the Chinese approach due to a lack of resources to control the population and isolate the infected and their contacts, as is done in mainland Chinese cities with large numbers of personnel. In the first two years of the pandemic, the extremely low numbers of infections and deaths had deluded Hong Kongers that they were safe and could live with Covid-19. Precisely this success has contributed to unleashing the crisis now: in January 2022 only one fifth of the population over 80 had been vaccinated with two doses and practically none with the third.
In pi, vaccines made in China were less effective of Western ones in preventing contagion and its more serious consequences.
The arrival of the variante Omicron led to the explosion of the viral bomb. And now that the vaccination campaign has regained vigor, it still seems too little and too late.
There are no funeral ceremonies for hundreds of Hong Kong elders who died in these days: the bodies are closed in sacks and are cremated to make room for more arrivals in hospital mortuary rooms.
March 15, 2022 (change March 15, 2022 | 14:21)
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